SKKN THPT Using Barrett’s Taxonomy to Enhance High School Students’ Reading Comprehension.

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Introduction​

The purpose of teaching English is to help the students use it as a means of communication in real-life contexts. It is necessary for the students to make use of English to exchange information, to state their opinions, and to express their feelings. Nowadays, English is used as the most popular and international language, and many people in Vietnam, especially people in Dong Nai , an industrial province need to use it as a communicative tool at work, on business or in commercial environments.

It is recognized that the main focus of learning English as a foreign language is heavily on communicative competence. The more opportunities students are given to practice using English in the classroom, the more effectively and fluently they can use in real-life situations. Therefore, as teachers of English, in order to increase communication in the classroom, there are a number of things we need to do, for example : effective teaching activities or methods, task adaptation , and students’ involvement, for the communicative level of Vietnamese students, I think , is still underdeveloped. On the other hand, the communicative needs are much more challenging than students’ communicative competence. As an attempt to improve the students’ reading skill, my first concern would be on questioning techniques.

Problems

In all of the high schools in Viet Nam , we have already used English 10, English 11 and English 12 as compulsory course books in the curriculum, and we also know that the three books above have many good points and certain limitations .

The course aims, according to the curriculum, are to help the students develop the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. In daily discussion with the students, I know that they want to learn English for communication. However, in my own experience of teaching, I have known that they have very few learning strategies for using the language, especially for reading comprehension.What they do in a reading lessoon is to copy what the teacher already writes on the board. They then translate words ,sentences into Vietnamese before completing exercises, or answering the teacher’s questions.

In reality, reading comprehension is one of the most complex but crucial skill of the four language skills for students learning English as a second or foreign language. It is not only an important means of gaining knowledge but also a means by which further studies take place, so teaching reading comprehension is very important to teachers of English in general, and to high school teachers in particular. This is also true for the teachers of English at Ngo Quyen High School, but the way in which they conduct the teaching of reading comprehension to students should be taken into consideration. Although they know the significance of reading comprehension, they think that vocabulary and grammar are much more important. Therefore in real-life teaching situations, most teachers focus on presenting vocabulary and practicing tasks on vocabulary. In observing three reading classes, I know that what the teachers do in a language class is to test reading rather than to teach reading , to foster passive learners rather than active and dynamic ones.

In addition, one of the most common ways for teachers to check reading comprehension is using sets of questions given in their text books. These questions are usually at literal comprehension or reorganization levels, which do not activate students’ higher levels of thinking. These types of questions can be answered without considering context clues or even without understanding the meaning of the passage or the writer’s intention. These literal comprehension questions just help students to scratch the surface of a text, while it is the responsibility of reading that helps the reader get deeper understanding of a passage.

As a researcher, I want to improve students’ reading skills and their levels of thinking. The research on teaching reading would be of great benefit to the students, teachers of English and administrators in my school. It is expected that the research findings will help teachers in other schools who are in the same teaching situation make an innovation in English teaching for the sake of students.

Purpose of the study.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of Barrett’s taxonomy on the development of reading skills of the ten graders in Ngo Quyen High School. The study also aims at introducing the Barrett’s taxonomy to the teachers in my school so that they can use this theoretical framework as a tool to maximize students’ thinking in reading comprehension. In addition, this framework can also be used for analyzing instructional materials and designing relevant types of questions for students of different levels. The following questions are considered the focus of my research proposal:

To what extent does the application of Barrett’s Taxonomy improve students’ reading comprehension skill in Baoloc high school?

How do teachers in Ngo Quyen High school feel about question levels in reading comprehension ?